The California Crossing Comanche Marker Tree

This pecan grew sideways on purpose, if the arborist who has studied it is right. Its trunk runs along the ground for about 25 feet before it turns and climbs, and Dallas arborist Steve Houser reads the scars on it as the marks of yucca rope: a flexible sapling, lashed down roughly 150 years ago so that it would point the way. That is what a Comanche marker tree is, a living signpost, bent young and left to grow into the shape of its instruction. The name comes from California Crossing, a low-water ford on the Elm Fork of the Trinity River used by Native Americans, by early settlers and by travellers heading west in the 1849 Gold Rush. In 2013 the Comanche Nation Tribal Elder Council and the tribe's Language and Cultural Preservation Committee formally recognised the tree. Ten years later, on 25 October 2023, Dallas City Council named it among the city's first Historic Trees, which means nobody may remove it without the council's say. Two live limbs rise from the bent trunk today, with signs of two more lost along the way. The measurements on record come from a 1997 survey: 43 feet tall, a crown 75 feet across, a trunk about 208 centimetres round. Those figures are 29 years old and the trunk has almost certainly kept growing, so if you have taped it more recently, tell us. The armory next door is fenced off. The tree is not: it stands in the public park.